Cartes Postales From Greece

by Victoria Hislop

  A dog ran at her from the shadows, stopped only by a huge chain. Involuntarily, she let out a cry of fear. From then on, her heart was pounding.

  Suddenly, in the darkness, she stumbled into a low bollard. Instinctively, she put out her hands to break her fall, and heard a distinctive crack. Her knees fell hard on the cobbles but it was her left wrist that she had broken. Within moments, it swelled and her fingers began to stiffen. Just before it would become an impossibility, she pulled off her wedding ring and slipped it into her jeans pocket. Soon, her fingers were as fat as sausages. Sitting on the kerbside, she rocked back and forth in pain, weeping with the agony that now swept over her. She vomited into the gutter.

  ‘Zut!’ she exclaimed, clutching at her wrist. ‘Zut! Zut … !’

  Blood was oozing through a tear in her jeans. Her knee was badly cut. She sat for several minutes to overcome the nausea and then, trying not to faint, used the bollard to pull herself up. After taking a few steps, she realised that she would have to sit again. Sinking back on to the pavement, she put her head between her knees, all the while trying to suppress her sobs of pain and frustration.

  After a while, her head was slightly clearer, so she got to her feet again. She must keep going. It was at least an hour since she had left Jean-Luc. Holding the wall for support, she edged down the street. In the distance was the seafront, and she could see movement there. She approached it cautiously. Not for a minute did Sylvie forget that there were people in this town who did not want them there.

  She could now see, up ahead, that a crowd was flowing along the esplanade. The end of the road was still a good hundred metres away and her going was slow. As she approached, she saw that the crowd was lining up along the water’s edge. There were no street lights and no lights in the cafés or tavernas by the water.

  A thousand people stood there: men, women, children. In the darkness, she could see that each one of them was holding a single long, white, unlit candle. A priest was chanting, but the crowd was silent, their faces expressionless.

  What are they doing? Sylvie asked herself.

  Very discreetly, she joined the edge of the group. Everybody had their eyes set on something out in front of them, ignoring the people they were standing next to. Sylvie realised that something was taking place in the water itself.

  Beside her, a child was pointing upwards to a bright light in the sky.

  From a cliff on the other side of the harbour came an orange light. It was travelling at a steady speed, apparently in mid-air, above the water. It was a fuse.

  A split second later there was an enormous explosion. The sound ricocheted back and forth from the rocks opposite. A conflagration had been ignited right in the middle of the harbour.

  Black against the dark blue of the sea, the silhouette of an island that had been built in the middle of the water rose. It resembled a stork’s nest and the whole thing was now alight, with flames licking up into the sky.

  On the island was a structure. It had been hard to make out at first, but now that the fire was raging she could see it clearly. It was a scaffold. A gallows, from which hung a limp figure.

  She remembered what she had read the day before about the effigy of Judas being burned on Easter Saturday.

  At that moment, there was a deafening series of explosions as fireworks went off in the sky above her and bangers were let off all around. It was like being on a battlefield. She flinched.

  Next to her, both left and right, the candles were being lit. One person passed a flame to the next, until all one thousand were glowing. All along the waterfront, flames flickered and danced, illuminating faces from beneath. People seemed happier than they had done the previous night.

  A woman thrust a candle into Sylvie’s right hand and lit it with hers.

  ‘Christos Anesti!’ she said gleefully. ‘Hronia Polla!’

  Sylvie did not have the slightest idea what she meant, nor did she appreciate that the flame with which her candle had been lit had been brought from Jerusalem that afternoon. It was a holy light. Christ was risen.

  Many people in the crowd were turning away now. It was time for their meal.

  Sylvie continued to watch the effigy, mesmerised. It was taking its time to burn, given the intensity of the fire, and its lanky shape made her think of Jean-Luc. Pain must be making her delirious.

  From one moment to the next, the wind changed and the flames licked in the direction of the quayside. A smell drifted her way. It was the distinctive scent of cooking meat, which was strange, given that nothing would be roasted until the following day.

  ‘Mon Dieu …’ said Sylvie under her breath, numb with shock. ‘Oh my God! Oh my God …!’

  After a few minutes, the flames died down again. The charred body smouldered. She stood motionless as the vertical support of the gibbet slowly keeled over and fell into the sea. Whatever remained of ‘Judas’ went with it. The island and everything on it had been incinerated, and all that remained were some blackened shreds of straw floating on the surface of the sea.

  The rest of the crowd had dispersed now, and she was afraid to be standing alone. She had to get back to the police station, but not to find a policeman. Sylvie already knew that this was futile. She took one last despairing look at the water and turned away.

  She hobbled as fast as she could, supporting her broken wrist with her right hand. Every step was agony. There were a few more lights in the houses now and, eventually, she saw the familiar sign.

  ASTINOMIA. POLICE.

  With dread, she dragged herself up the staircase. The door at the top was open.

  The outer room was unchanged, but the inner door had been closed. The bars that she had not noticed on her first visit the previous afternoon had been slid back.

  ‘Jean-Luc! Jean-Luc!’ she called out, almost too weak to speak. ‘Jean—’

  The door handle moved easily. She opened the door. The two beds were just as they had first seen them, with the grey blankets neatly tucked in. The air-conditioning vent was back in position. There was no sign that anyone had slept in the room. And no trace of her husband. She looked under the bed, in case there was a car key, his toothbrush … anything. Any piece of evidence that they had ever been in the room had gone. It was as if they had never been there.

  Adrenalin fuelled Sylvie’s flight from the village. The only thing of which she was certain was that she had to leave. The walk to the main road, however, took twice as long as it had done the previous day.

  The jeep, of course, was still locked. And it had no petrol, in any case. At around four in the morning, a truck passed, but it would not stop. The driver was probably drunk. She sat by the roadside in despair, shock paralysing her, her wrist and knee throbbing. At one point she reached into her pocket. Somewhere in the past hours, her wedding ring had fallen out. As the day broke, a farmer came by and gave her a lift. All he understood was that she had a broken-down car and a cracked wrist.

  He did not speak a word of French or English, but she was happy with silence. He took her to the next big town, fifty kilometres away.

  At the hospital there was a doctor who spoke French fluently. She was hysterical, almost incomprehensible in any language now, but she managed to relay her story. A number of other doctors and nurses gathered round her as the doctor translated. Several of them nodded. They, at least, believed her. Everyone in that part of Greece knew of the rumours surrounding that village and how, in past centuries, its inhabitants had used the occasion of Easter Saturday to hang a criminal. Few knew that it was a tradition that had been reinstated. Jean-Luc and Sylvie had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. In other words, without knowing it, they had broken one of the Draconian, if unwritten, laws of the village. They had intruded.

  There was no corpse, no evidence, no witness to support Sylvie’s story. To her horror, the young woman found herself under investigation. Everything went against her. Even the fact that she had ‘lost’ her wedding ring just days after being married suggeste
d that a terrible altercation had taken place that had led to her injuries. The police and the local people closed ranks. In the end, only the absence of a body meant that murder could not be proved.

  The Greek press were briefly obsessed by the case but after the trial the story was soon forgotten. Some time later in the window of the pantopoleion appeared two simple wedding bands, nestled between a multi-pack of plastic combs and a cracked Patek Philippe.

  My blood ran cold, thinking that I had eaten dinner overlooking that same harbour, and I had a nightmare about Jean-Luc that night.

  I spent a few more days in this comfortable, cheap hotel and then decided I should move on. I had been travelling for nearly nine months now and, though I was beginning to think less about you, other worries were beginning to creep in: firstly, my financial situation, and then the related anxiety over when I would have to return to London. I decided to put these things aside, at least for a while longer. First, I wanted to celebrate Easter, perhaps to rid myself of the images of what had happened to Sylvie and Jean-Luc. I ended up spending this important religious festival in a mountain village, where I was adopted by some hospitable strangers for a few days. I saw the burning of a Judas effigy for myself, shared their magiritsa (the lamb-gut soup) and stayed up until three in the morning listening to live music.

  The village was near Thermopylae, which is famous for the heroic last stand of three hundred Greeks against an invading force of more than one hundred thousand Persians (some historians think many more). I stopped in an empty car park by the huge monument there and I was moved by this memorial to an extraordinary feat of bravery, even though it took place more than two and a half thousand years ago. Next to a magnificent statue of King Leonidas wielding his spear were the words: Molon Lavay! – ‘Come and Get Them!’ This was his response to a demand to lay down his weapons. His defiance was uncompromising and impressive.

  Another car drew up while I was standing there and an elderly couple got out. They were probably in their early eighties, small in stature like most people of their generation, and very smart, in contrast with their battered old Toyota. The old man touched his cap in greeting and the three of us gazed quietly at Leonidas, silhouetted against a blood-red sky. The man turned to me and began speaking: ‘Filé mou, ehoume akomi sto ema mas tin andistasi. Etsi, alloste, ehasé ti zoi tou kai o aderfos mou. Kapii apo emas dev …’

  I loved hearing the flow of passion that poured from him, but felt I should tell him I was a foreigner and did not understand everything he was saying.

  ‘Sorry, sorry my friend!’ he said. ‘I was saying that it is still in our blood to resist! My brother lost his life that way. Some of us will never give in to the Germans!’

  Perhaps that’s why this memorial is still so affecting, because Greece is such a small country and has often been outnumbered and outgunned. There are strong memories of resistance against Germany and the Turks, and brave acts such as Leonidas’s have become the stuff of legend. Plenty of people feel that the country is suffering oppression by Germany even now and, though it is in an economic sense, the will to resist is strong.

  As the sun went down we went our separate ways.

  The evenings were distinctly warmer now. Summer was almost here.

  Although I had travelled very freely, there had always been one very specific place on my itinerary. It was somewhere that I had planned to take you, but now I was ready to go alone. I woke that morning and compared how I was feeling now with that black day in mid-September. The clouds had lifted. I realised that I would go to this place without sadness. And that I am no longer writing this for you.

  ‘Delphi: Beautiful and mysterious.’

  When I went there on a school trip, decades ago, these were the words I scribbled in the margin of an exercise book. It was not just the ancient stone pillars, amphitheatre and stadium that ignited my imagination. It was the atmosphere. It possessed something mystical. As a teenager, I responded to it, and I always wanted to go back to see if there was really something supernatural there – or had it just been in my adolescent mind?

  In the ancient world, great leaders took major decisions only after consulting the Delphic Oracle. A priestess sat in the Temple of Apollo, of which very little remains these days, and her utterances, once they had been interpreted by a priest, guided them. There are various theories about what induced the trance-like state in which she spoke. Her strange ramblings and hallucinations are now thought to have been brought on by the natural fumes that came up through a crack in the ground (perhaps ethylene or methane).

  For thousands of years, Delphi was a religious epicentre. People came from miles around to make sacrifices and seek advice. Then they gradually stopped believing and began finding alternatives, seeking truth through prayer, interpreting the stars, reading Tarot cards, gazing into crystals or, in Greece, examining the patterns in coffee grounds. There is just as much interest today in the search for enlightenment as in the past, though we look in different places.

  Sometimes when you revisit a place that made an impression it seems smaller, or in some way disappoints, but Delphi was more extraordinary than I remembered. The location seemed even more spectacular and there is now an elegant museum housing its glorious sculptures. On that dazzling day in May, I felt its magic again.

  The night after my visit to Delphi, I stayed in a small hotel in a nearby fishing village. At breakfast the following morning, there was a young woman eating alone. The silence was awkward in the empty dining room, so we started talking.

  At first, I didn’t realise she was Greek. I imagined she was a tourist like me. She had short, well-groomed hair, an expensive jacket and a camel-coloured handbag with some kind of designer tag. When she introduced herself as Athina, however, I guessed her nationality.

  ‘I’m just here for the weekend,’ she said, in perfect, slightly clipped, English. ‘I live in Germany.’

  This explained why she hadn’t quite seemed to fit my image of Greek women, and when I realised she was a young professional who had made a home in a northern European city, her cropped hair and chic, androgynous clothes were explained.

  ‘How do you find living in Germany?’

  It seemed polite to ask. I didn’t have to ask why she had moved there. She was one of many thousands of economic migrants from Greece who had left to find employment elsewhere.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she replied, in a non-committal way. ‘Banking is pretty well paid.’

  I didn’t ask her any more questions. The conversation turned to Delphi, what had impressed us, whether we liked the layout of the museum, and so on.

  Out of nowhere she said something so acutely personal I was completely lost for words.

  ‘I came to find myself.’

  She looked up from her plate and smiled for the first time in our conversation.

  ‘You know the words that were supposed to have been carved above the doorway into Apollo’s temple?’ she continued. ‘Gnothi s’eafton: Know thyself.’

  I nodded.

  She was pushing a piece of tomato around her plate but suddenly looked up and made eye contact with me.

  ‘For the first time in my life, I think I understood myself,’ she said.

  Her eyes were shining with excitement. Her serious demeanour had gone and, as she told me her story, she became more and more animated. Less Germanic, more Greek somehow.

  ‘I saw into my future!’

  ‘KNOW THYSELF’

  ‘Γνωθι Σαυτον’

  Just a month earlier, Athina had been on the twenty-eighth floor of an office block in Düsseldorf, gazing out of a tinted window at a view of other tinted windows. The entire area was dominated by gleaming glass towers and, in Athina’s eyes, they seemed to exist merely to reflect each other. The occupants were international corporations whose bankers, lawyers, brokers, hedge-fund managers and financiers existed to service each other in a self-perpetuating cycle of activity.

  The words ‘refinancing’, ‘blue chip�
��, ‘tax restructuring’, ‘due diligence’, ‘off-shore’ and other similar phrases floated above the boardroom table. She pondered the language of business. Whether in English, German or Greek, it was not hard to master, it was how you said something rather than what you said that seemed to count.

  In front of each executive, next to a notepad and a sharpened pencil, was a cup and saucer full of weak filter coffee which had gone cold some time before. These items that cluttered the table were as lacking in purpose as the meeting itself: everyone made notes on an iPad and sipped takeaway cappuccinos.

  Athina surreptitiously glanced at the time. The meeting had lasted almost two hours but they were only halfway through the agenda. She stifled a yawn. She had already given a presentation on a new telecoms company that needed refinancing, and now a colleague was taking the floor, using PowerPoint to present some financial forecasts. He was the latest recruit to the team, over-eager and over-prepared.

  What am I doing here? Athina asked herself. The first few weeks of living in Düsseldorf had been exciting, but once the novelty had worn off this question had surfaced in her mind every day. It had been more than a year now.

  Why was she living in a foreign country, in a cold climate, far from friends and family, doing a job she did not even enjoy? How had this happened?

  When the meeting finally ended, it was eight thirty in the evening. She threw her laptop into her briefcase and slipped out of the room without saying goodbye to her colleagues. The only way she had found to calm herself and to silence this inner scream of hers was yoga. Bikram, Ashtanga, meditational. She had tried them all, and there was a kind of brief solace to be had. She wondered if it was the only thing keeping her sane.

  If she didn’t run, she would miss her class.

  For an hour, incense and Indian mantras successfully wrapped her in their embrace, but it was for the ‘moment’ only. Once the caressing sounds of running water and wind-chimes had faded away, along with the scent of lavender and bergamot, all the benefits vanished, too. Well-being was just another commodity, sold by the hour. A poster on the wall outside the studio instructed: ‘Find yourself’, but if there was one thing she knew, it was that her ‘self’ was not to be found on a yoga mat.